


volim te

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1990s, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, bucky remembers the past, croatian bucky barnes, the only stevebucky is at the end lol, usual winter soldier amnesia bs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 15:12:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14718486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Bucky remembers where he came from.





	volim te

**Author's Note:**

> ok so. bucky is croatian for no other reason than that he Can be and also i really like the idea of him meeting steve the all american boy after immigrating from another country. also i’m croatian and uhhhhh yeah why not! 
> 
> ‘volim te’ means i love you!

September 1989

The Winter Soldier had a mission, and he had every intent to see it through. The streets of Dubrovnik were lively, but an underlying sense of unrest hid beneath it all. This was a country on the brink of war, and the soldier knew that feeling all too well. However, despite the fact that he had never been sent to Yugoslavia on a mission before, the rough paved streets and salty breeze rolling in from the Adriatic Sea were uncomfortably familiar. He couldn’t focus, which was the very last thing he wanted. He had a job to do and a distraction like that could be deadly. 

The soldier had been told to avoid the locals, to keep his head down until the last second. He wouldn’t even be able to interact because he didn’t know the language, they said. Russian would be sufficient when he reached his target. But, as he walked along the road, he could understand every conversation he passed by, stopping in his tracks the moment he realized and earning a few odd looks from strangers. The soldier adjusted his black denim jacket, making sure his gloves were pulled past the sleeves to hide the metal that had replaced his right arm, and continued. He took a deep breath and tried to ignore his increasingly familiar surroundings.  
He passed by a cafe, and he could imagine the smell of the food wafting out of its doors cooking in his own kitchen so well it was like a memory. Sarma, he thought, but he didn’t know why he knew what the people sitting under umbrellas outside the restaurant were eating. Sarma and spinach burek and baklava with pistachios. It’s better without pistachios, he thought, but he wasn’t sure why he had an opinion on it.

A few minutes of walking later, the soldier became distracted by a mother pushing a small child in a stroller. She was humming a little song in Croatian to the boy, and the soldier remembered something from his past.

He was somewhere other than Dubrovnik, that he knew for sure, but a woman was holding him close to her chest, quietly humming the same soft, sweet, foreign yet all-too-familiar lullaby as the mother on the street.

“Volim te, James.” she whispered, pressing a kiss to his forehead, and the soldier wanted more than ever to reach back through the past and tell this woman ‘I love you’ back. His heart ached, but he continued on his way. He was trained to stay in the moment, to never stray away from what he was told, to question nothing, but sometimes he would have moments where something would call out to him and try to jog his empty mind. The soldier forced himself to focus on the present and keep on his way down the street, but that didn’t stop him from whispering ‘Volim te’’ under his breath the whole way.

January 1993

The Winter Soldier is back in Dubrovnik, now half destroyed, the same street he had walked down before nearly all reduced to rubble and uncomfortably quiet. The people who once lived here are either displaced or dead. The entire country is a warzone, and he is once again here on a mission, but he gives himself a bit of time to walk around under the cover of night and try to remember just a little bit more. It was still called Yugoslavia the last time he was here, and the time before it that he so desperately wants to recall, but the republic has broken down into several different countries in a bloody civil war that had loomed over the heads of its citizens for years. He passes an apartment complex that is now a shell of a building, and he stops on the broken sidewalk in front of it and stares up at what was once someone’s home. Could it have been his, once upon a time? He sits on the remains of a brick stoop, feels the cool sea breeze against his face, and remembers something more.

He is young, not more than eight or nine, standing with the same woman as before and a girl a few years younger than himself on a busy dock. The city of Dubrovnik is to their backs as they wait in the crowd and watch ships pull in from the horizon. A gentle wind coasts in from the sea. The woman is clutching a worn-down suitcase, and the soldier knows it holds everything the three of them own in the world.

“Will we ever come back?” the boy (not yet the soldier) asks his mother, tugging on her skirt to pull her attention away from the water. She smiles sadly and takes the boy’s hand in her own, ruffling his hair with her free hand. 

“Maybe you will someday, lima.” His mother takes the young girl’s hand as well, and the trio advances towards a ship that has just docked and begun to accept passengers. She digs three slightly crumpled tickets out of her coat pocket. “Maybe someday, but we are making a new life for ourselves! Remember, America is the land of opportunity!” The line of people approaching the ship moves, and they shuffle along, not acknowledging the tears that well up in their eyes as they silently say goodbye to their home. “Volim te,” she whispers and squeezes the boy’s hand.

“Volim te, Mama.” he whispers back.

The soldier is snapped back to the present as he hears yelling from a rooftop- a sniper has spotted him and is aiming to kill. He runs for cover, a bullet bouncing off of his vibranium arm. The sniper yells again in confusion and lines up another shot, but the soldier has already disappeared into the dark. He sprints down the road, behind blown-up buildings, as far as he can until he reaches somewhere safe. 

November 2015

The soldier has returned to the Adriatic coast- no longer really the Winter Soldier. His name is Bucky, but his mother called him James. He remembers bits and pieces of his childhood here in Dubrovnik, but it’s like a fairytale someone used to tell him to lull him to sleep. It’s blurry and stitched together from what he can pull out of his own destroyed memory. He lived through both of the world wars and fought in one before he was turned against himself and made into a living weapon. He’s seen more than anyone should ever have to. Still, his past is murky and foggy like the river he remembers diving into after someone he barely knew. Bucky had saved that man’s life and he still didn’t know why. Captain America’s bloody and bruised face is burned into his mind, and even though he thinks it’s the first time they’d ever met, the Captain obviously thought otherwise.

He keeps a journal of everywhere he goes, written in Croatian. Croatian comes easier to him than English after 70 years of speaking almost exclusively Russian. It’s falling apart and has been fixed a million times with Scotch tape and the ink is all smudged, but it’s his most important possession. Its pages are filled with everything from what and where he eats each day to things he starts to remember about himself and can’t afford to lose again. In the middle of it all is a folded-up flyer about a Captain America exhibit he found the last time he was in America. It’s crumpled and ripped and faded past the point of being readable, but Bucky can’t get himself to part with it.

Bucky is constantly on the move, crisscrossing back and forth through Europe, but he makes stops in Croatia as often as possible. Walking up and down the streets of Dubrovnik is as close as he’ll get to having a home. Of course, he remembers Brooklyn, but he can’t go back to the States as a wanted criminal. He remembers a cramped apartment that was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter that he shared with his mother and little sister, and he remembered a little blonde boy who he used to tag around with, but that’s it. His clearest memory of all is the day he left his homeland. Bucky would give anything in the world to go back in time, back before the war, back before he was an immigrant, and never leave the Balkans. Bucky could have lived his whole life here, and he longs for that more than almost anything else.

May 2016

Bucky holds the remains of his metal arm in his human hand and stares at the sparking wires protruding from it. Even though he doesn’t feel any pain, he cradles it like he does. A man he now recognizes as Steve Rogers (the man he pulled out of the river, the little punk he used to run around New York with) sits next to him, one hand placed gently on Bucky’s leg. They sit in silence, processing what has just happened. The quinjet they’re piloting is traveling somewhere over Siberia, and the sky outside the windows is grey and clouded.

“I missed you, Buck.” Steve clears his throat, breaking the silence. His voice breaks and he wipes a tear from his eye before it can run down his cheek. “I really, really fucking missed you.”

Bucky nods and bites his lip. “I missed you too. So much.” he whispers back, leaning his head against Steve’s shoulder. “I remember a lot now, you know.”

“Like what?” Steve asks as he wraps his arm around Bucky’s shoulder, pulling him even closer against his chest.

A soft smile spreads across Bucky’s face. “Lots of things. Remember how desperate we were to make money? We used to go around looking for old cans and bottles in alleys se we could turn ‘em in for pennies.”

Steve smiles again and it’s so warm and genuine it warms Bucky to the core. “We made like, what, five cents each?”

“Hey, that was good money back then. That was a fortune for two scruffy little kids!” Bucky runs his hand through Steve’s blonde hair and pushes the strands back into place. “It’s longer than it used to be,” he notes. 

Steve shrugs and returns the gesture, tucking Bucky’s shaggy hair behind his ear. “So’s yours, Buck. It’s not 1942 anymore, you know.”

Bucky laughs sadly and rests his head in Steve’s lap. “Yeah. It isn’t.” he sighs.

They sit in the quiet for a few minutes longer before Steve speaks up again.

“I love you, Buck.”

“I love you too, Steve.” he pauses for a moment. “Volim te.”

**Author's Note:**

> sorry yugoslav history nerds some of the timeline stuff is off bc the actual dates of the siege of dubrovnik are really close to when bucky killed tony’s parents so i thought that would be weird if it was hella close together
> 
> comment for a free iphone x


End file.
